Walk the Ice Unseen
by Allekha
Summary: Victor first sees her when he is thirteen: graceful, ethereal, and skating with inhuman elegance and skill. "Show us," she will ask of him later, "show everyone the beauty, the music, the extent of what skating can be." (Canon AU with fantasy elements; mostly gen, minor Victor/Yuuri.)


Victor sees her for the first time when he is thirteen, his star rising through the ranks of the junior skaters. He is learning how to play the part, how to smile cutely for the photos, growing his hair longer and longer until he doesn't cut it anymore. And his love for skating only seems to grow year by year – he pushes himself harder and harder for it, seeing just how close to perfect he can become on the ice, falling in love with the dance and the jumps and the simple glide of his blades, no matter how it hurts to do so.

The rink is usually near-empty at this time, if anyone is there at all, and Yakov has ducked away to make a phone call. Victor doesn't notice her at first, too busy lacing up his skates and brushing his hair from his face – it's still too short to make a proper ponytail yet, and he's forgotten the bobby pins one of the girls gave him. The sound of skates hitting the ice makes him look up.

There is a girl on the ice whom he has never seen before. She can't be more than a couple of years older than him, though it's hard to place her age. She draws one arm over her head in a graceful movement that would make even Lilia pleased to see, before lifting one foot and bending back to catch her skate. She extends into what must be the most beautiful Biellmann he's ever seen, her leg almost entirely straight over her back.

He watches, enchanted, as she finishes the rest of her routine. At the end, her face settles into a satisfied expression, her eyes closed and her mouth a gentle curve, her arms folded delicately against her chest, before she opens her eyes again and turns to smile at him.

He smiles back on reflex, now, though it's more genuine than it normally is. "That was incredible," he tells her as she skates towards him.

She dips her head, still smiling. "Good luck with your practice, Victor," she says, her voice high and clear, each sound clipped sharply. "I'm looking forward to your lovely performance." Then she steps off the ice, just as Yakov comes in, and disappears.

After that, he sees her around the rink sometimes – she's easy to pick out. Her skin is even more pale than his; her hair is silvery-blond and her eyes are so light that she never seems to be looking at anything, except when she meets his gaze, which she always does with a slight smile that makes her face glow. People seem to have trouble remembering her name, and all anyone knows about her is that she transferred recently from another city and doesn't talk much.

She seems to live on the ice, rarely appearing in the hallways or outside the building. There are days Victor comes in to find her dancing to random songs on the radio, or humming to herself as she does ballet in a silent room with frost creeping up the windows. Once she throws herself into a backflip at a crescendo; Victor sees her do triple axels with no apparent effort, each smooth and controlled and landed perfectly.

Never, once, does she fall or so much as touch down; it's rare to see her under- or over-rotate her jumps, even.

There is something about her presence that he finds oddly inspiring and relaxing at the same time. There are days when she appears by the side of the rink, watching him, when he is simply skating for the soothing rhythm of it and for himself, and it feels like he is still comfortably alone. There are other times when she watches him practice, standing motionless the whole time with her arms folded on the wall of the rink, and his body feels just a bit lighter as he throws himself through skill after skill, trying to get everything right.

It strikes him one day, as he takes a break to gulp water down, that Yakov almost entirely ignores her. He doesn't yell at her when she stands next to him, gaze fixed on Victor, or when she is on the ice far too late at night, skating aimless circles with her eyes closed. He realizes, too, then, that he has never seen her truly skate when anybody else is around, even Yakov. She only does her gorgeous spins and perfect jumps when it's the two of them and no-one else.

He is almost surprised, then, when she comes along to a competition. Again, though, she seems to slip away from everyone's notice. Victor sees Yakov have a murmured, short conversation with her, once, and doesn't see her again until he's finished his short program and is panting on the ice, bowing to the applause (he already knows that it will be the top score, yes, good, but he can do even better—).

She is watching from the side of the rink, a few feet away from Yakov, smiling. "That was beautiful," she says to him as he awaits his scores. "You felt the music. Your free skate, I'm sure, you'll embody it even more."

So he does, his mind blank of everything except the performance – the sweep of the music, a soft classical piece; the dance he has practiced so many times it seems ingrained; his breath, his heartbeat, the faint pain of his body that he ignores, ignores, ignores.

He takes first place with a decent margin. Yakov manages to find places to nitpick his performance, but the lecture is shorter than usual. "Do it again," she whispers to him as they move away from the ice, her voice strangely close to his ear as they walk together. "Again, and again, and again, I want to see it forever."

She, somehow, has taken third. He doesn't understand why. Later, he tugs on her bronze medal and asks her what happened, curious. "You skate like a goddess," he tells her.

"Only some people get to see that performance," she says. Her eyes are distant as she touches the medal, as she turns her head from their perch on the edge of a water fountain in the hotel lobby and in the direction of the large windows that show the snow falling outside. It's a gentle, fluffy snow that isn't sticking just yet. "I don't care about placements. They don't matter."

He doesn't ask about it again. He enjoys their shared secret, the occasional treat of seeing her in fluid action. It's not often – perhaps once a month unless he is lucky – but it's always captivating. Once, he sees her do a part of his short program that he's been struggling with, turning it from dull to expressive, and when he copies her later in practice, thinking of the way she canted her hip and tilted the line of her body, it feels _right_. He knows he has it long before he sees Yakov's pleased face.

Her smile is softer the next time he sees her, not skating but tracing spirals in the frozen windowpanes. She sits there the whole day, in fact, never running out of room to draw without getting up, and nobody asks her about it. When Victor finishes for the day, she unfolds herself and stands with her usual elegance, no evidence of stiffness from being still for so long in the movement of her limbs. Despite the fact that it was sunny all day, and not all that cold, the bottom of the window is covered with frost on the outside. "You're almost there," she tells him.

"I know."

His first competition of the season is in a week. She doesn't come, this time. He earns a personal best with his short program, and despite a fall in his free skate, wins gold again with little worry. When he tells her about it, some days later, she tilts her head and says, quiet in the empty room but clear: "Show me." When he finishes the demonstration, she blinks once, slow, and says, "Closer, closer."

Just before he makes his senior debut, she dies. It's sudden; one day she is spinning in slow circles in the early morning light from the windows, singing quiet folk songs to herself, and the next Yakov passingly mentions that she died in the hospital the night before.

The transition to the senior level is difficult, even for him, and he stumbles and pushes through. Ultimately, he isn't satisfied with his season, though there are good points about it and the press has nothing but praise for him. He gets a dog, which helps, having something soft and warm to come home to and curl up in bed with. Makkachin doesn't care if he comes home limping, if he got yelled at for landing wrong on a fall, if he had to struggle to get through practice. Makkachin only wants walks and food and cuddles at night and gives him endless affection in return, especially when he returns from events far away.

At a competition early in the next season, he goes out for coffee with a few of the other skaters in the afternoon, partially because he's tired from his flight and can't sleep, and partially because the guy who asked him was cute and might distract him from wondering if Makkachin is missing him badly, if he will return home again to broken objects and scratched floors. Unfortunately, while the guy is cute, he is unbearably dull, and Victor is getting tired of plastering on a smile when the café's chime rings. "Sorry I'm late, I was looking for this one," a voice says from behind him, probably another skater Victor doesn't recognize.

Victor looks down at his half-drunk coffee and only looks up when the chair across from him pulls out, whispering along the floor rather than screeching, thinking that perhaps this person will at least be interesting enough to get him through the rest of his drink. It's not the man who spoke, however; it's a young woman.

She looks completely different, but he _knows_. It's in her eyes, it's in the way she smiles at him, it's in the way she opens her mouth and says in a new voice, lower and gentler and round, "Hello again, Victor. I suppose it's been a while."

She orders water, with extra ice, and crunches on it between sentences.

While everyone else gets embroiled in an argument that starts as a joke and ends up turning real, she asks him about his skating, then says, "I heard you have a dog now."

He tells her about Makkachin as she places sliver after sliver of ice between her white teeth and cracks it, swallows it, doesn't touch the water, not until her ice is gone. He wants to see her in the rink; she is hard to look away from even sitting still in a café. She has beautiful bone structure, with sharp cheeks and round eyes, topped with soft curls in pale gold, though the magazine articles he will see later prefer to focus on the albinism that has bleached her skin of the dark color she should have inherited from her Sudanese parents.

On the way back to the hotel, in a voice that carries only to him and not the rest of the group (now turned back to cheerful laughter), she tells him about America where she lives now, the way the snow and ice is different from that of Russia. Fat white flakes start to float down as they walk, few and scattered. With no wind, they feel soft and gentle when they hit his cheeks, catch in his eyelashes before they melt.

He sees her skate one time during their time there, for him alone. She dances with the same unearthly grace, floating across the ice, spinning pirouettes and tucking her head against her fanned fingers, and she even does the extended Biellmann again, and despite her more muscular build, despite her shorter legs and longer neck, it looks exactly the same.

She stands by the rink for his programs, everyone stepping around her still form, and clasps her hands in front of her chest after each of his performances. They go more easily this time, his body stronger and his mind more experienced. She doesn't beg for more after the kiss-and-cry; he thinks she expects it, from the look on her face as she adjusts a flower in his hair. "I'll see you in China," he says as her fingers falls away.

"I'll be there," she says. "And then I'll be in Russia." Her lips turn up and her pale eyelashes flutter.

She turns up on the ice in Saint Petersburg early in the morning a few days after her competition ends. A silver medal rests on top of a magazine with crisp, new pages on the wall of the rink. This version of her is a darling of the skating media. They gush about her appearance, her dancing, her spins, and seem to forget about the triple axel she lands perfectly in competition. Before she had never merited so much as a mention.

They skate together, going back and forth in copying each other. She grabs his hand to slip under his arm, bent backwards so low that she nearly touches the ice, before letting go to perform a loop straight from Georgi's free skate, and that is when Yakov comes in. He doesn't seem to even see her at all, now, just gruffly demands that they get started without looking at her as she laughs and turns a curlicue circle around Victor.

She shouldn't show up at the European Championships, but she does, a pass around her neck, attracting no notice as she stands and gazes at the skaters. For him, though, for him she shows her teeth, straightens her back, gives him every bit of his attention when he steps onto the ice. "Show me something beautiful," she whispers, and the sound carries farther than it should. "I know you will, I know."

He smiles for her, for the crowd, and gives them the show they're waiting for. This is how he was meant to skate, he knows, as he turns jumps that earn their own cheers and dances through movements that leave the audience breathless. First place. He lets a fan get doe-eyed giving him a rose crown; he tosses a flower to a younger skater whose name and face he doesn't quite remember. He is already thinking of next year.

During the competition, Paris is blanketed in a picturesque snowfall that causes no real inconvenience, except for being so pretty that tourists continually stop to take photos. Makkachin would probably love to play in it, he thinks, to roll in it and toss new flurries into the air.

She takes his picture for him outside an old building a few hours before his flight home, sitting on a stone bench in early-morning light. She takes two, actually, one of him posing with perfect posture and his hair falling neat over his coat, and a second when the breeze kicks up and blows his hair in his face. In that one, he is grimacing, trying to pull it away from his eyes, hunched away from the wind. It looks nothing like the photos he usually sees himself in, the ones that get made into posters and which adorn magazine articles.

The following winter, he ducks out of a post-competition party early because he is too tired from winning another gold medal to put up with the insipid conversation – the only interesting person had been a local girl who hadn't medaled but was quick and witty, and she disappeared at some point. He takes a long way back to the hotel to enjoy the quiet residential streets. On rounding a corner, he sees her again, dancing silently on a patch of a ice shining brightly in the moonlight, though her ballet flats don't slip at all as she raises herself up on her toes, spins with her arms arced together over her head, bends one leg and slips the other forward.

"Dance with me," she sighs, and he follows her to an outdoor rink. They don't actually dance; they skate next to each other, making slow circles with the rest of the crowd until the early morning. The rental skates are terrible, but at least the lights are pretty and the music is soothing and quiet enough to talk, if either of them wanted to talk. They don't. There is just the rhythm of their blades meeting the ice again and again.

A year later, he first reads about her death on Twitter, a freak plane crash.

The next time he travels, a young woman from Italy with pale brown hair and eyes like silver smiles at him from across a hotel lobby and later pulls him with a cold, long-fingered hand to the rink to demand he skate for her and her alone. There is no music, but his mind conjures some up, and she watches with the same intensity she always gives him until it's so late that even sleeping in to the last moment will hardly get him enough sleep.

Now she dances like a whirlwind, so fast he can't believe she has time to breathe. When he picks out music for her, she spins and steps even faster to match. The first time he watches her, she lands a quad Salchow on what almost looks like a whim, as steady and perfect as ever. When she wants to, though, she can scrape up the ice into flakes until the rink looks like the aftermath of a blizzard.

She sends him off before each performance, telling him, "Victor, Victor, dance for me, dance for us, show us what figure skating can _be_ ," and he does, not because she wants it but because he wants it too. He wants to show them all the limits of skating, he wants to show them something they have never, ever seen before.

It works; the crowd chants his name each time he shows up on the ice, are charmed by his practiced smiles and practiced jumps and practiced dances, the way he does what nobody else does or can even try to do.

When she watches the others, she fidgets constantly: shuffling her feet, swaying her head to follow the movements across the ice, tapping her fingers like she's tracking each skater's heartbeat. Rarely – and for him it is always – does she fall quiet and unmoving again, before bursting into happy, high-pitched laughter when the music fades. When they do _very_ well, she bounces in place, clapping loudly.

It's a joy to see from the rink, this praise that so few earn. After a while, he starts to use it as another benchmark of his performances, beyond the roar of the crowd and the points on the board that trend upward every year. How excited is the look in her eyes? How high does she jump from her joy?

She is there the first time he lands his quad flip in competition, changed at the last moment because he fell on an earlier jump and he's so mad at himself because it was the easiest one of his program, and he sweeps into the jump – turns – lands with just a touch of wobble – the crowd erupts. Yakov tells him off for the change at the kiss-and-cry before letting Victor sink into a hug with him as the scores come up. He's in first; the only person left to go is Chris, and even if he skates perfectly he can't pull above second place. She has been looking at him with shining eyes since he got off the ice. Probably since long before then. She follows him to the interviews, a proud face behind the sea of people wanting to ask him about his performance.

Later, at the banquet, Chris is shaking his head at Victor and vowing to win next time when his eyes lock on something over Victor's shoulder. She appears next to them dressed in pale blue, her eyelids dusted with silver. Her smile is full of teeth. It is the first time Victor sees anybody else look fully and directly at her. They talk, for a short while, though it's hard to listen to her. She talks too fast, so fast she keeps loosing her breath, so fast her words blend together.

They end up sneaking out and finding their way to the ice together, the three of them, because of course that's where she wants to go. They can't keep up with her wild turns, but every once in a while she pauses to watch them going at their slower pace. Chris, it turns out, met her several times as the American, but he seems to prefer her like this, unyielding and energetic to the point of franticness.

That energy she has is in him, too, and he drives himself with it. He breaks his own world records over and over again, piles more quads into his programs over Yakov's grumbling about how he's skating himself into an early grave, keeps Chris in second place again and again and again. He watches everyone scramble to keep up with him. He polishes his English and French and his smiles and his answers to interview questions; he finally gives in and cuts his hair, like so many people have been telling him he should, and she is one of the few not to comment on it the next time they meet.

By twenty-four he is known as a living legend, a national treasure, even, in the more hyperbolic magazine headlines, as the god of skating. She laughs when he shows her one and tells him that he is never going to be a god. The sound is loud enough to cover up the faint roar from the wind outside. She arrived in Saint Petersberg three days ago, and it has been a constant blizzard ever since. "That is good, though," she says as she regains her composure. "A god is boring. Humans, they are very interesting. _You_ are more beautiful and more surprising than any legend."

He smiles at her and goes on to make a neat sweep of the competitions that year, because how else can he keep up with what everyone expects of him?

After holding out for so long in this form, she dies of a heart attack during the off season.

At first he doesn't think much of it when she doesn't show up for a while. It took more than a year after the first time, if he remembers correctly. He does miss her, though, when he finishes his free skate at the GPF and looks up to see only two people waiting at the side of the rink for him: Chris, with a resigned tilt to his grin, silver yet again, and Yakov, whose face is almost as foreboding as it always is but which Victor can read as happy for him.

A girl with ice-blue eyes and blond hair asks him to dance at the banquet. He doesn't think it's her even for a moment; the girl's hair is too dark, and her edges aren't sharp enough. He gives her a dance anyway and sends her back off to her friends with a wide grin on her face.

The next day, he gets home and curls up on the couch with Makkachin. He tries not to think about the slew of events still in front of him, the imperfections he still needs to iron out of his performances, the numbers that everything adds up to. Makkachin's fur is soft, and when Victor gets too caught up in his thoughts, his dog is there to whine for better scratches.

He skates the rest of the season, and the next, and she doesn't show up. He doesn't know why. He wonders once in a while if she is off somewhere inspiring skaters who actually need it, and is too busy to seek out the man who never _needed_ the thrill she gave him to do better than everyone else. Or, perhaps, she's dead, or at least taking her time in reincarnating again.

He gets tempted to ask Chris if he has seen her, but he never does.

He wins the GPF for the fifth time in a row, and still there are no blue-grey-silver eyes watching him. The crowd cheers for him, for the accomplishment they expected from him, and he tries not to think of next year. How much further can he push the boundaries of skating? How many more times does he need to break his records?

It's hard not to miss her in moments like these, the adoration in her eyes, her elegant movements, the times when they would simply glide together without doing much of anything. No words, no smiles, no expectations.

Then he meets Yuuri Katsuki at the banquet – Yuuri who can dance like anything, Yuuri who isn't afraid to strip down with Chris and put on a show and beg Victor to be his coach afterward and then give him the time of his life. He reminds Victor, just a little bit, of her, in the inspiring energy they both seem to radiate, in the way they dance.

Victor has never had half this much fun at a banquet, and he waits the next few days for Yuuri to contact him somehow – a text, an email, a Twitter message (though Yuuri doesn't seem to use Twitter, or Instagram, or even Facebook; Victor has checked multiple times). When he hears nothing, though – when Yuuri quietly returns to America without so much as leaving his phone number – he reluctantly puts the whole matter on its own shelf. He has forgotten plenty of promises of his own, but this one hurts in a way he didn't expect. He wonders what the audience would think of a song about heartbreak.

Just as he's started working out the choreography, the video of Yuuri's version of his routine is sent to him by at least five different people – by an angry Yuri and delighted Chris and Mila – and things move so quickly after that.

It's nice to skate only for himself (and Yuuri, and Yuri) again, without thinking of a coach or an audience. Still, however, there are moments when, even now that it's been years, he looks up expecting to see her standing to the side, watching him still and quiet.

A few months into his stay in Hasetsu – after Yuri has gone home and he is trying his best to get Yuuri gold-medal ready – they reach the rink on an early morning, an unseasonable frost collecting on everything from the chilly air. Yuuri grumbles quietly about the cold as they go in, until his voice suddenly dies in his throat.

There's someone in the rink, even though it's supposed to be reserved for them – not that anybody tends to come by at this time anyway. Victor is just about to raise his voice when he gets a good look at the woman on the ice.

She raises one foot, arches her back, and pulls her leg straight up into an exquisite Biellmann. She holds it for what seems like should be a painfully long time, before dropping out of it and continuing her dance to the silence, to the music she sets for herself. After several long moments, she turns an effortless triple axel, twists like she's considering doing something further, but instead pulls her arms into her body and settles into a pose.

She looks up. She smiles at him. She smiles at Yuuri. She smiles at both of them and makes her way to the side. "I'm sorry," she says, her words soft. "I'm interrupting your practice time, aren't I."

"I-It's fine," says Yuuri. He's staring straight at her.

She looks to be Japanese now, though the hair swaying over her shoulders is pale blond. Her eyes have a shine to them, like black ice in sunlight. Her lips curve up and she turns back to the rink, skating idly and tilting her head back to the ceiling.

"You know her? Is she a local?" Victor asks Yuuri. The part of him that still doesn't understand why Yuuri initially rejected him, why he can't just dance the _eros_ he showed at the banquet, has a teasing remark about her being an ex vaguely formed and lined up.

"No," Yuuri says softly. He looks away from her. "I haven't seen her before. She just reminds me of a girl I knew in Detroit for a while. Ah, but she..."

She steps off when they step on, stands there and fixes her eyes on Yuuri. Victor drifts over toward her while Yuuri begins another run-through of his Eros program. Cold fingers curl delicately over his shoulder from behind as they watch together. "Both of you are marvelous," she says, leaning into his ear as Yuuri starts on his step sequence. "Just look at him... I wonder, what can you show me and everyone if you're working together?"

Yuuri isn't quite there yet. But he _can_ be. All Victor has to do is draw out that potential, the Yuuri that entranced him at the banquet.

"He's going to win gold at the Grand Prix Final this year," he says. Yuuri _will_.

"Don't you remember? I told you, I told you. I don't care about placements." She sighs and her hand melts away from his shirt. She says nothing further; she stands in the same place for the rest of their practice.

She is there some days and not others. Yuuri always greets her in quiet Japanese when she appears, and they might make a few comments to each other, simple things which Victor is starting to half-understand, before practice begins. He never lets her distract him once he gets going, only occasionally throwing her a look when he takes a short break.

One day, Yuuri tells him of an idea he has to change his exhibition program for the GPF to add Victor, which he says with rather more words than necessary, several of them fumbled. Victor can't remember the last time he felt this pleased. He can't seem to agree fast enough; he smiles to see Yuuri ducking his head to hide a shy grin that looks just as happy as he feels. He rushes into arranging everything, the choreography and the matching costume, digging up a duet version of _Stay Close to Me_ from his hard drive.

It takes some tries to get it right, given that neither of them has done this kind of thing before. She is there every time they practice it, as silent as ever, but without her usual straight back. Instead, she leans her elbows forward on the wall of the rink and rests her head on her curled fingers.

When they finally nail it – when Victor manages to finally pull his eyes off of Yuuri, who is panting and warm and bright and wonderful in his arms – he looks up and happens to meet her gaze. Her eyes may be black now, but they are shining as much as Yuuri's. "Oh," she says, so soft her voice is on the edge of his hearing. "There we go."


End file.
